It is difficult to review a film when you have
trouble understanding what it is about, and even the title of L.O.R.D: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties
has me scratching my head. Part of the difficulty comes from the fact that the
film is based on a book series, which the filmmaker seems to assume his
audience is already familiar with. For this fanbase, the convoluted animated
fantasy world of the film may be easier to grasp, but everyone else is likely
to get lost in the various storylines and ensemble cast of generic CGI
characters. By the end of the film, I was no clearer on the point of the
narrative, but simply embracing the mild spectacle of endless fight scenes.

There is not
nearly enough backstory given to the audience before throwing them into the
center of this fantasy universe, in which fighters known as soul masters are
equipped with soul beasts. Lowly bus boy Qi Ling (voiced by Cheney Chen)
unwittingly tames a legendary soul beast known as Ice Fang, so Yin Chen (Kris
Wu) shows up to take him on as a disciple. This is a familiar formula, filled
with training sequences as Qi Ling discovers his abilities and how to use them.
But the film does not stop there, adding in countless other characters in a complicated
battle between seven lords over four territories, never making it entirely
clear why they are fighting with each other in the first place.

When we are
allowed to simply follow Qi Ling on his path to become one of the soul masters,
the film is easy enough to follow. Unfortunately, the narrative is over-stuffed
with characters, many of which are only truly distinguishable by their soul
beasts, which come in the form of various animals. By the end, however, they
all seemed to be fighting each other with little explanation why, not to
mention why we should care. The primary focus seemed to be the visual spectacle
rather than the story or characters.

As far as motion
capture CGI movies go, L.O.R.D. is
rather generic. The animation is not awful, but it is also hardly cutting edge.
The action is where all of the effort went, and there are a few sequences that
are full of spectacle, but it never saves the scenes of dialogue from looking
like a bad video game. The soul beasts look decent enough, but the dubbing
rarely matches up with the lips of characters when they speak and their eyes
look completely soulless. This is the type of animation that likely would have
impressed a decade ago, but now it feels somewhat sub par.

The DVD comes
with no special features. There is truly no reason to purchase or rent this
film unless you are a dedicated fan of animated Chinese fantasy or because of
pre-existing knowledge of the books.